Asimov's SF, July 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  * * * *

  Then the woman reappears onscreen and says, “Sorry about the accommodations,” and the glowing being realizes without surprise, I can hear now. “We're preparing a facility for you. It'll be more comfortable. And safer. Safer for everybody. Meanwhile, this is the best we could do on short notice.”

  I know you, thinks the glowing woman (by now the glowing being has determined that much about itself, she is in fact a woman), and she says, “Micol” (for she has finally recognized Micol), “Micol,” and, yes, unsurprisingly, that is her voice, “Micol, what—”

  Micol flinches at the sound of her name, adjusts something at her end, announces, “That's better.” She makes an elaborate business of examining the console at that end and avoiding eye contact at this end. She says, “You understand that it'll be best if you stay behind the yellow line there, don't you? We, uh, we don't want you frying the electronic equipment.”

  “Micol, what am I am doing here? Where is here? What happened?”

  “We're trying to find out. Believe me.” Micol's lips compress for a moment. “But this is so—you just have to be patient. Try and be patient. Please.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “There was an accident. No, I mean an incident.”

  “Well, one or the other, something's wrong with this picture. I'm supposed to be—the last thing I remember is the jump station, the tech counting down. What happened?”

  “The chief'll tell you about it when he gets here.”

  “But where is here?”

  But Micol doesn't answer the question, and the chief, when he comes onscreen, looks haggard and frightened, with eyes sunk in bruised-looking flesh. He says, “I'm going to make this as simple as I know how. I told you in the first briefing that the spacetime anomaly is essentially where Point A and Point B happen to come together. But, more exactly, they approach each other. They're separate points and always remain separate points no matter how closely they approach each other. There's always going to be an infinitesimal gap between them, possibly less than a Planck unit, right down at the level of quantum foam. But, still, a gap. Till now, objects, animals, people've all gone through without mishap. But we think Point A and Point B somehow got out of alignment on this particular occasion—when Phyllis Lewis tried to go through. Because of the misalignment, she didn't go through.”

  The glowing woman says, “Why are you referring to me in the third person?”

  “Listen carefully. Phyllis Lewis didn't go through, she's safe, no need to worry about her, but something else did go through. Whenever something goes through the spacetime anomaly, it produces a sort of echo, you might even call it a ghost. After-images, except that they aren't images, really, but electromagnetic shadows. Whatever goes through creates a sort of template, and for the briefest instant afterward there's something left. Sort of a free-standing, highly localized anomaly in its own right. In this case, it's been given definition by the idea of Phyllis Lewis. It thinks it is Phyllis Lewis.”

  “Well,” says the glowing woman, in a flash of Phyllis Lewis’ inimitable humor, “isn't that a kick in the teeth!”

  * * * *

  By now the glowing woman has determined that she is myself, Phyllis Lewis, some approximation thereof. No: I am, I was, I am this person. I know everything she knew, remember everything she remembered.

  I remember being shown one of the biological specimens the robot probe had brought back through the spacetime anomaly, remember looking at it blankly, asking, What is it? “Look at it,” I was told. I am looking at it, I said, it looks like enough sushi for a family of six. “Look at it, Phyl!” I'm a tech, I protest, not a marine biologist. “Oh, come on, Phyl, think back to your books about prehistoric times. Here's a marine arthropod with a trifurcation running the length of the body, cephalon, thorax, pygidium—” The tone of voice compelled me to look at the creature more carefully. Then, of course, I realized what it was and even why I hadn't recognized it: it wasn't the kind of thing you expected to see in fresh condition. I said, incredulously, Jeez, it looks like a trilobite. “Yeah.” But they all went extinct hundreds of millions of years ago. “Yeah.” But—! “Yeah.”

  I remember being asked to join an advance team that would go through the spacetime anomaly, to the world that lay at the other end or on the other side or wherever, whatever it was.

  I remember going to Port Aransas on the coast for a weekend getaway with my husband—"our last chance,” he called it, “for four hundred million years.” We had rented a beach condo and arrived late in the afternoon, just as a storm broke; the ferry got us across the shipping channel a beat or two ahead of driving rain, howling wind, lightning, and thunder. A thick smell of insecticide practically smacked us in the face when we opened the door. Our choices were to endure it or go huddle in the car; we chose to endure. The condo was furnished in Early Indifferent, everything shading back and forth between beige and blah, upholstery, carpet, walls, reproductions of two landscapes and one still life. It barely qualified as decor at all. We turned the fans on high in hopes of dissipating the smell and unpacked and made do while the storm blew itself out. The rain had stopped by dawn the following morning, and the overcast was breaking up. Although the fans had run all night long, the smell seemed undiminished in its potency; we tried opening all the doors and windows, but the insecticide smell finally drove us out of doors. Not that we really minded being out of doors. I proposed a walk on the beach; we could make our way around to the town when we got hungry. There were cacti and little yellow blossoms among the dune grass, and small lizards and a huge ant bed on the path itself. A bumblebee crossed in front of us, then an orange butterfly. We marveled, and I said, You don't expect to find bugs at the beach, and my husband said easily, “The insecticide should've been enough of a clue.” We emerged from the dunes and held hands like teenagers as we walked along the beach. Where vehicles hadn't packed it down the dark rain-dimpled sand looked as fine and crumbly as brown sugar. Shells and pieces of shells and tangles of orange-brown seaweed lay everywhere, gulls wheeled overhead, sandpipers ran through the foam. A small diving bird I couldn't identify repeatedly plunged headfirst into the surf. Among the foraging wading birds was another I didn't know, some kind of heron or crane, and I resolved privately to brush up on my shore birds. I also saw a darting sand-colored crab no bigger around than my thumbnail, the mouths of filter feeders’ dens, and a stranded Portuguese man-of-war. Nothing existed at this end of the island that wasn't geared to the wants of tourists and the needs of those who catered to tourists, but across the channel on the mainland lay another world entirely, a landscape littered with petro-industrial hardware. Visible from the island, against a backdrop of cranes and oil storage tanks, an immense rig for offshore drilling operations lay on its side like some child Titan's discarded toy. Out to sea, a long low ship glided like a phantom across the rim of the horizon, and I could just barely see two upright rigs. Come on, I said, there's a little pagan ritual we must perform here. We kicked off our sandals and waded into the cool water up to our knees, stood feeling the wave action suck sand out from under our heels; he dipped his hand into the water, brushed his fingers across my face, and I ran my tongue over my lips and said, We've lived inland too long. I was excited, happy, and I felt I wanted, needed, to say more, perhaps something about the irresistible call of the sea, how the sea flavors our blood, but I felt too self-conscious. And then I noticed tears in his eyes. Darling, darling, I asked, what is it?

  * * * *

  Curiously, though, as my sense of identity sharpens, my sense of being in a real place diminishes. In a dream strange things may happen in accordance with some strange or even indiscernible logic. You can accept a dream on its own terms up to a point beyond which an element of the dream becomes off-putting and you suddenly reject the dream. You remember that an important character in the dream is dead or that a certain activity or situation is simply impossible. And you awaken.

  Then perhaps I am awakening. If I
look away from the walls of my prison, they vanish, and the monitors, too, and everything else, and then when I look at them again they are there, but somehow less convincingly so.

  I tell myself, Think this through now. Do you really believe that material things don't exist if you aren't looking directly at them? Or thinking about them? Perhaps the question needs to be inverted: Do you believe the things you are looking at and thinking about actually exist without reference to yourself ? The chief speaks of a ghost. How do you confine a ghost? How do you transport a ghost to a place of confinement—especially if it is supposedly bleeding lethal radiation and can burn holes in solid rock with its touch? How can you even have substance or occupy space? You're supposed to be an electromagnetic pulse. Why even bother to construct a cage for a phenomenon as short-lived as an electromagnetic pulse? You'd fry electronic equipment. Is all of this, then, occurring only in my head, in my shadow of a head, that is, during an infinitesimal moment?

  And now I recall a Durrell line read in college, “Are people continuously themselves, or simply over and over again so fast that they give the illusion of continuous features—the temporal flicker of old silent film?”

  C'est fucking moi. You only think you were a person named Phyllis Lewis. You only think you have a body and organs. You only think you are, or at least were, human. But you are a ghost of a real human being, not even a real ghost at that. And there is no P.A. system here, no TV cameras or monitors, no prison deep inside the earth.

  But part of me still wants to believe otherwise. It protests, How, then, do we communicate with—?

  And then it catches itself up short. Of course: we don't communicate with anybody. There is no them with whom to communicate. It's just you and I. Talking to ourselves. Talking to myself. Existing for a timeless interval, but only as a side-effect or by-product of particle decay. And alone. Alone. Alone.

  No. Not quite. My husband and I waded into the cool water up to our knees, and he dipped his hand into the water, brushed his fingers across my face, and I was happy, excited by the prospect of going through the anomaly but deeply satisfied to be standing knee-deep in water with my husband. And then I noticed tears in his eyes. Darling, darling, I asked, what is it? He almost sobbed. “Whoever says time travel won't have its martyrs, just as space travel did? This anomaly business is so new and different and—weird. Who knows what could happen?” Nothing is going to happen to me, I said, I'm going to slip through and help set up a jump station on the other side, and then I'm coming right back. To you. To all this. Promise.

  I have, for as long as I do have it, for either a nanosecond or an eon, everything Phyllis Lewis has. I have my memories.

  Copyright (c) 2008 Steven Utley

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Short Story: CASCADING VIOLET HAIR

  by R. Neube

  R. Neube mixes love and plutonium in a hot tale about...

  the sighting

  It was Thursday, so, I walked home from work with Paul Li.

  “C'mon, Henry, pick up the pace. It isn't aerobic until your heart breaks a sweat.”

  “My liver's dripping. Isn't that enough?” I asked.

  “You have to change your flabby life.” The barrel-chested man winked at a pedestrian as he pulled off his shirt. Paul strutted, basking as if the rush-hour crowd had turned out solely to worship his physique.

  “It's not flab, but my strategic reserve for the next famine.”

  “There a blow-out at Lingren's tonight. Why don't you join us?”

  “No thanks,” I grumbled, trying to pretend I wasn't out of breath.

  “C'mon, Henry, you can't mourn forever.”

  “Get bent.” My mind's eye watched my wife's body bag arcing toward Jupiter on its three year flight to eternity. I successfully chilled memories of her scent.

  “Rikki has a sister with a taste for older men.” Paul jogged circles around me.

  “I'll pass.”

  A woman lifted her face. For a lingering heartbeat her grey eyes tickled my blues. I froze, a statue honoring idiocy through the ages.

  Short and delicate, she vacuumed the hall as the crowd moved around her, dancing with the machine. Rolls of jumpsuit bulged over her free wrist and ankles. The Red Cross suit had been de-armed to accommodate a cast from armpit to right wrist. A fading, yellow bruise stretched from her forehead to her jaw, detouring around an oversized eye. Long violet hair formed a thick braid down her stooped back.

  I'd seen hundreds like her over the years. The government of our orbital city allowed the Red Cross latitude as long as their wards performed tasks civil servants refused to do.

  Paul grabbed me by the scruff. “Don't even think it. She's a char!”

  “Let me go!”

  “Char, char, char-ity. She's burnt out trash.” Head shaking, my buddy released me. “You're insane.” Paul broke into a jog.

  Knees a-quiver, I approached her. My brain achieved Zen blankness as I stepped in the way of her vacuum. She killed its motor. Sausage fingers—out of place on the rest of her body—produced a knife. Grey eyes spoke to me long before her full lips moved.

  “Out of my way, yerpie.” Her oddly accented vowels pegged her as a Lunar.

  “Lookit, my name's Henry Newton. Here's my ID. I'm not a perv, but you won't believe me because I can't stop babbling when I'm nervous, so just stab me and put me out of my misery.”

  “What time is it?”

  Mom had warned me when I quit college that dropouts evolved into polis idiots who answered simple questions with a resounding “Huh?”

  Her blade clicked back into its aluminum hilt. “I don't have a watch.”

  My racing mind could not interpret the numbers, so I held my watch in front of her. She returned the ID to my sweating hand. Fresh scars where her right ear had been seemed to spell something.

  “I'm due for a break.”

  I fingercombed my beard. “Gracie Fernald runs a place that's close.”

  “Is a hundred Neds enough to buy a cup of coffee?”

  “There hasn't been real coffee around here in ages. But she serves good coffee-water. My treat. No strings. Honest.”

  “Touch me and you'll carry your hand home in a doggie bag.”

  “That's the nicest thing anyone has said to me today.”

  I didn't ring the doorbell. My thumb pressed the lockplate. Gracie waved when the panel opened. The aroma of potato soup filled her apartment. I trundled the vacuum cleaner into a corner where two overstuffed chairs touched like guilty lovers. I mimed for coffee-water and cornbread. In a trice Gracie set a tray on the wall ledge beside us.

  “How can she stand intruders in her home?” asked my guest once Gracie disappeared.

  “It's cheaper than therapy. Her husbands and kids were killed in the same accident that k-killed my—” I coughed the knot from my throat. “A freighter sideswiped our polis a few years ago. Killed a lot of people. This pseudo-restaurant keeps her busy, social, and sane.”

  She scrutinized the contents of her steaming mug. “It should be called water-coffee.”

  “Buy coffee by-products, add some chems, and you have a product that doesn't require hard currency to import. That's life in the bankruptcy lane—ingenuity replaces currency.”

  She escalated from timid rabbit nibbles to virtually inhaling the cornbread. “I'm Diane Woltz, late of Mobil Habitat.”

  “That's darkside, isn't it?”

  “I like a man who knows his lunar geography.”

  I stared at my feet. “What's the line on a geography fan getting a date?”

  “I am NOT a prostitute! I may be a char-ity case, but I don't sell myself. It'll take me eighteen months to earn my fare home. I plan to work for it all.”

  Cornbread crumbled. Silence pounded my ego into gravel.

  “I didn't mean—”

  “You don't deserve this. I'm on edge. Someone spat on me today.” She gulped the scalding brew. “I'm assigned to Skylark Hall tomorrow. I g
o off-shift at 16.00. See you there. No strings, luggie.”

  “N-none.” Trembling hands spilled fluid down my chest.

  “By the way,” she said, banging my knee with her cast, “long hair looks absurd on a man your age.”

  I fingercombed my thinning locks after Diane departed. I couldn't decide whether to faint or throw up.

  Gracie arrived to clean up our debris. “Chars are jinxed, Henry. And they can infect you with their bad luck.”

  “If you can't hope, what sense does life make? Can you put this on my tab?”

  “Don't think with your wrong brain, Henry.”

  * * * *

  first date

  “This is not a date!” Diane poured on the speed to keep two steps ahead of me.

  “I would have brought flowers, but I'm not rich. It was a choice between a sack of macaroni or ... this.”

  Her wraparound was a plaid denim, its stains hardly noticeable. When she spun to face me, unbraided hair sprayed out in a violet cape. Her cast whacked my chest. She shook the box I'd given her over a trash bin. Dust showered off.

  How had I missed that?

  “I don't want your unwanted Christmas gifts.”

  “It's—I bought it for my ... for my wife before the accident. It might be a trifle large for you.”

  Trapping the box under her cast, she tore it open. Wadding the synsilk blouse into a tight ball, she shoved it into my bag. We resumed our double-time march.

  Don't worry, I told myself, you've made worse impressions. Remember when you caught Lisa's hair on fire during our first date? Don't say anything about Lisa. DON'T bore your date.

  “The space here is astonishing. All the orbital cities I've visited felt like sardine cans, people everywhere.”

  “Fifteen to twenty citizens a week have migrated since our city's first bankruptcy,” I explained. “And then there are the suicides. After our ninth national bankruptcy, you'd think people would have learnt how to cope. We've reached bottom. The Sol Monetary Fund guarantees our resource loans, so we can get our air and water on credit.”